Garrett blinked after her. “What’s up with her?”
“Nina being Nina.”
The next trip on Amaryllis went well. We made quota in less time than I expected, which gave us half a day’s vacation. We anchored off a deserted bit of shore and went swimming, lay on deck and took in the sun, ate the last of the oranges and dried mackerel that J.J. had sent along with us. It was a good day.
But we had to head back some time and face the scales. I weighed our haul three times with Amaryllis’ scale, got a different number each time, but all within ten pounds of each other, and more importantly twenty pounds under quota. Not that it would matter. We rowed into the slip at the scale house, and Anders was the scalemaster on duty again. I almost hauled up our sails and turned us around, never to return. I couldn’t face him, not after the perfect trip. Nina was right—it wasn’t fair that this one man could ruin us with false surpluses and black marks.
Silently, we secured Amaryllis to the dock and began handing up our cargo. I managed to keep from even looking at Anders, which probably made me look guilty in his eyes. But we’d already established I could be queen of perfection and he would consider me guilty.
Anders’ frown was smug, his gaze judgmental. I could already hear him tell me I was fifty pounds over quota. Another haul like that, he’d say, we’ll have to see about yanking your fishing rights. I’d have to punch him. I almost told Garrett to hold me back if I looked like I was going to punch him. But he was already keeping himself between the two of us, as if he thought I might really do it.
If the old scalemaster managed to break up Amaryllis, I’d murder him. And wouldn’t that be a worse crime than any I might represent?
Anders drew out the moment, looking us all up and down before finally announcing, “Sixty over this time. And you think you’re good at this.”
My hands tightened into fists. I imagined myself lunging at him. At this point, what could I lose?
“We’d like an audit,” Nina said, slipping past Sun, Garrett, and me to stand before the stationmaster, frowning, hands on her hips.
“Excuse me?” Anders said.
“An audit. I think your scale is wrong, and we’d like an audit. Right?” She looked at me.
It was probably better than punching him. “Yes,” I said, after a flabbergasted moment. “Yes, we would like an audit.”
That set off two hours of chaos in the scale house. Anders protested, hollered at us, threatened us. I sent Sun to the committee house to summon official oversight—he wouldn’t try to play nice, and they couldn’t brush him off. June and Abe, two senior committee members, arrived, austere in gray and annoyed.
“What’s the complaint?” June said.
Everyone looked at me to answer. I almost denied it—that was my first impulse. Don’t fight, don’t make waves. Because maybe I deserved the trash I got. Or my mother did, but she wasn’t here, was she?
But Nina was looking at me with her innocent brown eyes, and this was for her.
I wore a perfectly neutral, business-like expression when I spoke to June and Abe. This wasn’t about me, it was about business, quotas, and being fair.
“Scalemaster Anders adjusts the scale’s calibration when he sees us coming.”
I was amazed when they turned accusing gazes at him and not at me. Anders’ mouth worked, trying to stutter a defense, but he had nothing to say.
The committee confirmed that Anders was rigging his scale. They offered us reparations, out of Anders’ own rations. I considered—it would mean extra credits, extra food and supplies for the household. We’d been discussing getting another windmill, petitioning for another well. Instead, I recommended that any penalties they wanted to levy should go to community funds. I just wanted Amaryllis treated fairly.
And I wanted a meeting, to make one more petition before the committee.
Garrett walked with me to the committee office the next morning.
“I should have been the one to think of requesting an audit,” I said.
“Nina isn’t as scared of the committee as you are. As you were,” he said.
“I’m not—” But I stopped, because he was right.
He squeezed my hand. His smile was amused, his gaze warm. He seemed to find the whole thing entertaining. Me—I was relieved, exhausted, giddy, ashamed. Mostly relieved.
We, Amaryllis, had done nothing wrong. I had done nothing wrong.
Garrett gave me a long kiss, then waited outside while I went to sit before the committee.
June was in her chair, along with five other committee members, behind their long table with their slate boards, tally sheets, and lists of quotas. I sat across from them, alone, hands clenched in my lap, trying not to tap my feet. Trying to appear as proud and assured as they did. A stray breeze slipped through the open windows and cooled the cinderblock room.
After polite greetings, June said, “You wanted to make a petition?”
“We—the Amaryllis crew—would like to request an increase in our quota. Just a small one.”
June nodded. “We’ve already discussed it and we’re of a mind to allow an increase. Would that be suitable?”
Suitable as what? As reparation? As an apology? My mouth was dry, my tongue frozen. My eyes stung, wanting to weep, but that would have damaged our chances, as much as just being me did.
“There’s one more thing,” I managed. “With an increased quota, we can feed another mouth.”
It was an arrogant thing to say, but I had no reason to be polite.
They could chastise me, send me away without a word, lecture me on wanting too much when there wasn’t enough to go around. Tell me that it was more important to maintain what we had rather than try to expand—expansion was arrogance. We simply had to maintain. But they didn’t. They didn’t even look shocked at what I had said.
June, so elegant, I thought, with her long gray hair braided and resting over her shoulder, a knitted shawl draped around her, as much for decoration as for warmth, reached into the bag at her feet and retrieved a folded piece of cloth, which she pushed across the table toward me. I didn’t want to touch it. I was still afraid, as if I’d reach for it and June would snatch it away at the last moment. I didn’t want to unfold it to see the red and green pattern in full, in case it was some other color instead.
But I did, even though my hand shook. And there it was. I clenched the banner in my fist; no one would be able to pry it out.
“Is there anything else you’d like to speak of?” June asked.
“No,” I said, my voice a whisper. I stood, nodded at each of them. Held the banner to my chest, and left the room.
Garrett and I discussed it on the way back to the house. The rest of the crew was waiting in the courtyard for us: Dakota in her skirt and tunic, hair in a tangled bun; J.J. with his arms crossed, looking worried; Sun, shirtless, hands on hips, inquiring. And Nina, right there in front, bouncing almost.
I regarded them, trying to be inscrutable, gritting my teeth to keep from bursting into laughter. I held our banner behind my back to hide it. Garrett held my other hand.
“Well?” Nina finally said. “How did it go? What did they say?”
The surprise wasn’t going to get any better than this. I shook out the banner and held it up for them to see. And oh, I’d never seen all of them wide-eyed and wondering, mouths gaping like fish, at once.
Nina broke the spell, laughing and running at me, throwing herself into my arms. We nearly fell over.
Then we were all hugging, and Dakota started worrying right off, talking about what we needed to build a crib, all the fabric we’d need for diapers, and how we only had nine months to save up the credits for it.
I recovered enough to hold Nina at arm’s length, so I could look her in the eyes when I pressed the banner into her hands. She nearly dropped it at first, skittering from it as if it were fire. So I closed her fingers around the fabric and held them there.
“It’s yours,” I said. “I want you to
have it.” I glanced at Garrett to be sure. And yes, he was still smiling.
Staring at me, Nina held it to her chest, much like I had. “But…you. It’s yours…” She started crying. Then so did I, gathering her close and holding her tight while she spoke through tears, “Don’t you want to be a mother?”
In fact, I rather thought I already was.
Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of the Kitty Norville series. The eighth novel, Kitty Goes to War, is due out in July 2010. She’s also written a young adult novel, Voices of Dragons, and a stand-alone fantasy novel, Discord’s Apple. Her short stories can be found in many magazines and anthologies. She lives in Colorado with a fluffy attack dog. Visit her at www.carrievaughn.com.
Spotlight: Carrie Vaughn
What inspired the future depicted in your story?
The initial seed of inspiration was my ocean-going characters, who made their livelihood by the sea. I had to find a world to put them in, and I thought about what a positive post-apocalyptic future would look like. That is, the civilization-shattering disaster happened, but humanity didn’t lose all its technology (as I don’t think we would) and has managed, at least in this region, to build a successful, sustainable society. It would look different than our culture, but it wouldn’t be entirely alien.
I brought all this to Paolo Bacigalupi and had a talk with him about what it would take to build that kind of society, and he brought in the concept of social engineering versus technological engineering. That is, most of the problems we’re dealing with aren’t actually technological. We can solve the technology—it’s the social aspects, the social expectations that are at issue.
And then that brought me to a world where attitudes toward childbearing are quite different than what we have. Sustainability is achieved by avoiding overproduction, and that includes having kids.
Do you think science fiction is an effective tool for showing people the necessity of developing a way to forge a sustainable future?
Well, I think it’s a very effective tool for running thought experiments about what could happen if we don’t solve some of these problems. I’m not sure anyone really sees them as a blueprint for how to develop a sustainable future—stories are usually focused on conflict and problems rather than solutions. I worry that people with an aversion to cautionary tales don’t see past that aspect of that kind of story and so blow them off entirely.
What kind of things should governments be doing now to keep the kinds of extreme measures depicted in your story from being necessary?
I don’t know how much governments really can do. It’s back to the social engineering problem. The attitudes of people and the communities they form have to change, and that can’t be legislated.
At what point do you think that “family planning” becomes “community planning,” as it is in your story, and how close do you think we are to that tipping point?
There’s that overused saying, “It takes a village to raise a child.” I think we’re pretty darned close to some kind of tipping point, since so many family-planning issues are huge hot-button political topics right now: what defines marriage, how children should be educated, the legality of abortion, the necessity of strong sex ed programs, etc. This stuff used to be tucked away behind closed doors or taken for granted, and now it’s in flux, with diametrically opposed philosophies coming into vast, sometimes violent conflict over it.
This is part of why I question a government’s ability to do anything about this, since we’re dealing with people’s fundamental beliefs at this point. How do you convince someone who believes that God wants them to have 19 kids that that sort of lifestyle is unsustainable on a large scale? That the community might see that as a ridiculous drain of resources for one family to demand?
The real tipping point will come when most individual, nuclear families can no longer rely on themselves for the resources they need to survive. When a group of families in a community become interconnected to the point where they depend on each other for survival. When an individual can’t make decisions without having those decisions affect the entire community.
Right now, in the industrialized world at least, a financially successful family or individual can stay pretty isolated from their community, if they so choose. But if there’s ever a cataclysmic loss of resources, that could change.
One of the themes of your story is the faceted nature of “motherhood” and the relationship of mothers and daughters. How did your own experiences of motherhood—as a daughter, a mother, a mentor—go into shaping those aspects of your characters?
Well, the bulk of my experience that went into the story is as a childless woman in her late thirties who seems to lack any kind of biological clock and is frankly quite baffled with the spate of childbearing that’s been going on in my peer group for the last ten years or so. Lately I’ve been trying to tap into that dynamic of wanting kids, having kids, trying to have kids, etc. if nothing else so that I have something to talk about with all these new families. That’s part of why I focused the story on that—how would attitudes about childbearing change in this kind of environment? Will people ever get to a point where they believe that having children is a carefully-guarded privilege rather than something that nearly everybody does as a matter of course?
It’s almost an ongoing joke with some of me and my friends—you need a license to be able to drive a car, but absolutely anyone can have kids, at any time. What if that wasn’t the case? Maybe that shouldn’t be the case. And at that point you have a vast political can of worms. Which is just fascinating, isn’t it?
That brings in the pretty strong point in the story that a woman can be a mother without actually giving birth. The definition of motherhood itself will change in a situation like this. Marie is the mother of her household, and her household is absolutely a family, even though we might not immediately recognize it as such.
You have an interesting mix of high-tech and low-tech in “Amaryllis”: forced, surgically implanted contraception, but adobe housing. What were some of the challenges in keeping a future low-tech world believable?
I started with the assumption that a resources-related apocalypse wouldn’t instantly take society back to a pre-industrial level of technology. People would still have a lot of the bits and pieces—like solar power, wind power, etc.—of modern technology.
Adobe’s an interesting example, because living out in the west and southwest, adobe isn’t necessarily seen as low-tech. Instead, it’s ubiquitous—it’s widely used because it’s so well-suited to the environment, stays cool in the summer, retains heat in the winter, it uses readily available materials, etc. Same with wind power. Wind power is ancient and adaptable. It would be the first technology people would turn to in the absence of coal and oil.
Medical technology is something I imagined that people in this world would hang onto as much as they could. Also, the knowledge of modern fishing and canning techniques aren’t going to vanish.
I wanted to build a community that had obviously banded together to survive, had guarded and nurtured and passed down an important set of technologies to help with that survival, but also maintained a fairly low-tech way of life as a matter of survival.
This kind of thing is going on right now, to varying degrees. There are households using solar and wind power to get off the grid, that have turned to growing and raising their own food as a way to avoid some of the problems associated with industrial agriculture, and so on. I took that movement and tried to extrapolate it to an entire community.
Every Step We Take
Amanda Rose Levy
Climate change. Overfished oceans. Killer hurricanes. Species extinction. Polluted air and water. Not a pretty list, is it? And a hell of a legacy we’re leaving behind for the kids. But these are the harsh realities we’re facing now as the consequences of our decades of planetary abuse finally come a-callin’. So what, if anything, can we do to fix this fine mess we’ve gotten ourselves into?
Hum
anity has always treated nature as a thing to be conquered and controlled, harnessed and harvested. We like being the masters of our domain. But last century, let’s face it, things got completely out of hand, leading to near system failure on a global scale and contributing to the depletion of our natural resources faster than they can be replenished. So is it any wonder that the last few years have seen a real push towards finding more sustainable ways of living?
From car companies to television networks to cleaning products, who isn’t talking “green” these days? But talk is cheap (and talk from corporations a whole lot cheaper) and real progress has to be promoted, and made, on a grassroots level. But what does all this green talk really add up to? What should we be doing to make a difference? What, exactly, does sustainable mean?
Well, just for fun, let’s look at the situation through the lens of the Aesop fable “The Ant and the Grasshopper.” Remember this one? The ant works laboriously throughout the whole year to put away enough food to live comfortably in winter. The grasshopper, meanwhile, spends all summer singing and dancing without a thought to saving for the future. One guess as to who makes it through December. Moral of the story: prepare today for the needs of tomorrow.
But sustainability isn’t just about saving for the future, and it’s not about sacrificing, either. It’s about living responsibly within our means and meeting our present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs.
The challenge of sustainable living is to preserve one’s quality of life without deprivation or lowering one’s lifestyle. It’s about consuming only the resources we need, leading to improved living conditions via ecological, economical and aesthetic preservation. Living like the Ant ensures progress and survival. Living like the Grasshopper…well, that leads to the problems we’re dealing with now.
The best measure of sustainable achievement is our Ecological Footprint, an estimation of how each of us is personally responsible for energy efficiency in our pursuit of four basic human needs: food, energy, materials and water. Our footprint’s size indicates the impact that our activities and lifestyle choices have on the Earth. In this case, smaller is better.
Lightspeed Magazine Issue 1 Page 9
